Summary: REVIEWS
Genomic and proteomic approaches to the identifica-
tion of new targets for drug intervention present
unprecedented opportunities for the discovery of new
agents with novel therapeutic modes of action1
.
Nevertheless, some daunting difficulties and risks will
need to be overcome to realize this potential.
Historically,the proteins that the pharmaceutical indus-
try has targeted for drug discovery have generally been
well understood from a mechanistic and biological
standpoint. By contrast, relatively little or nothing
might be known about the mechanism or biological
function of a`genomics'target,which might be rendered
interesting in the first instance simply by virtue of its
appearance in a disease context or apparent effects in a
shotgun gene-knockout experiment. So, genomics-
based target discovery is typically followed by a laborious
process of target validation, which generally produces
useful, although often ambiguous, information about